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Gilbey on Film: Situation critical

In his introductory column last week, the Telegraph's new film reviewer, Robbie Collin (late of the late News of the World) set out his stall with a comforting introduction for the paper's readers, who are easily frightened and don't take kindly to shocks, especially if they haven't yet had their lunchtime medication. It was just as well that Collin's tone evoked jolly japes and matey cuddles, as the sight of a new face on the arts pages will have alarmed many after nearly a decade of film writing by the stimulating, unorthodox Sukhdev Sandhu.

(By the by: one of those to leave a comment on Collin's piece, under the handle "corgimajor," did the unspeakable and raised the subject of the outgoing critic, which is rather like pitching up at a chap's wedding and mentioning his bride's ex: "I was disappointed not to see an acknowledgement, in Robbie's introduction of himself, of the great work Sukhdev Sandhu has provided for this section of the Telegraph over the years. Could someone at least let me know...where I might find his work in the future?" At the time of writing, no one at the website has yet answered this reader's enquiry. The comment did, though, provide a reminder of the way in which readers are expected to simply adjust to new arrivals. To editors, we are but the children of divorces, waking up in the morning to find that Mummy has a new boyfriend.)

Before issuing a rather baffling warning about two species of Naughty Critic (those who write exclusively to impress other critics, and those who serve to flatter the stars or filmmakers) and insisting that he belongs to neither group, Collin laid out what he considered to be the requirements for anyone writing about movies. Such people should, he said, "watch films and then write about them in a way that is honest, well-informed and entertaining. We should tell you what a film is about, put it into context, explain what we think works and what doesn't, and do all this in a way that is pleasurable to read."

Well, yes. But put in those terms, it sounds at best like a set of instructions for the home assembly of a bookcase, and at worst like a nurse preparing you for a mildly invasive procedure which will nevertheless have lasting beneficial effects. What Collin describes are the rudiments, the skills that should get a writer past reception. When I think back to the critics who first inspired or thrilled me, the common ground is not that they met the Collin criteria, but that they did so much more besides, spinning off into unpredictable or far-flung areas of their subject, while always throwing illumination back onto it.

The first person who made me realise what could be possible in critical writing was Anne Billson, whose sparky, playful prose never fails to bring her subjects to life (even the half-dead ones: I remember laughing aloud in my school lunch-break at her short Time Out review of Wild Geese II). In the interests of transparency I should point out that she has since become a friend and colleague (as well as a predecessor, having served a stint as film critic on the NS) but my admiration for her was already cemented a good decade before we met.

I also got a big kick, obviously, out of the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, that liberating force of nature, and Victor Lewis-Smith, the then-television critic of the Evening Standard. (I recommend the latter's prickly collection of columns, Inside the Magic Rectangle). But if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name my favourite critics, I would say, "What are you doing? Put that gun away for goodness sake! I'm more than happy to tell you my favourite critics without the threat of injury or death." Then, after disqualifying my esteemed NS colleagues in the interest of neutrality, I would produce for you a roll-call that included the following:

Nancy Banks-SmithSadly no longer writing about television in the Guardian (although she still contributes a splendid monthly Archers column), she is an embodiment of so many qualities to which a critic should aspire: her mixture of the frothy and the weighty, her ear for a delicious or telling phrase, her instinctive feel for articulating the shape and shading of whatever she is writing about, and her palpable love of her subject. If she's ever written an indulgent or wasteful sentence, I haven't read it. I wrote a fan letter to her many years ago, partly to balance out the karma of having written to a director on the same day complaining about his latest terrible film, but mostly because if you love anyone that much, it's only right to let them know.

Giles Smith The ceaselessly witty sports-on-TV critic at the Times. His columns are collected in Midnight in the Garden of Evel Knievel and We Need to Talk About Kevin Keegan. Here's a measure of how good his writing is: I read him whenever I can and I don't even like sport.

Adam Mars-Jones Former film critic at the Independent and the Times, and now a literary critic at the Observer. There's no one more thorough, or more capable of making the forensic funny, although Steven Poole's book reviews in the Guardian's Saturday Review supplement run a close and satisfying second.

Nigel Andrews Film critic at the Financial Times. It's not only that Nigel Andrews knows his onions (and everyone else's) or that he writes with an enviable mixture of deftness and muscularity; there's also fact that he has been writing professionally for around four decades, and still has the nimblest pen in film criticism.

Anthony Quinn. Film critic, the Independent. I go to Anthony Quinn for the crispness of his prose, the sophistication of his insights, the purity of his perspective (he didn't read anything about Avatar before reviewing it -- nothing at all!) and his passion for the underrated medium of solid storytelling.

Then there are writers who may not be moored to particular posts: Dennis Lim, whose star has not waned since he was waved off five years ago by short-sighted cost-cutters at the Village Voice; his former VV colleague Jessica Winter, now arts editor at Time magazine; David Heuser, who writes on film infrequently and for his own pleasure, but who produced one of the richest film essays I have read in the past few years (about Noah Baumbach's Greenberg: read it here) and who has done the impossible and made Inception sound interesting. I also want to recommend a brilliant site of critical writing by Chris O'Leary about David Bowie: Pushing Ahead of the Dame takes a fine-toothed comb to Bowie's work, dissecting each song in obsessive detail. It sounds tediously nerdy but doesn't read that way; O'Leary's weightless writing inflames rather than kills your interest in the music.

So what can we learn from this subjective list of favourites, other than that it helps to have "Smith" somewhere in your surname if you are going to be a better-than-average critic? Only that each conforms in his or her own way to the most pertinent piece of advice that any creative person could ever wish to receive. And no it isn't from Robbie Collin. It's Maupassant:

Talent... is a matter of looking at anything you want to express long enoughand closely enough to discover in it some aspect that nobody has yet seen or described. In everything there is an unexplored element because we are prone by habit to use our eyes only in combination with the memory of what others before us have thought about the thing we are looking at. The most insignificant thing contains some little unknown element. We must find it. To describe a fire burning or a tree on a plain let us stand in front of that fire and that tree until for us they no longer look like any other tree or any other fire.

It is in this way that we become original...

Whatever we want to convey, there is only one word to express it, one verb to animate it, one adjective to qualify it. We must therefore go on seeking that word, verb or adjective until we have discovered it, and never be satisfied with approximations, never fall back on tricks... or tomfoolery of language to dodge the difficulty.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.